Cross-Cultural Examinations of Racially Ambiguous Face Categorization: An American and Taiwanese Comparison

• In Event: 2-071 - Diverse Perspectives: Pushing Developmental Research Beyond WEIRD Samples

Integrative Statement

Background: Social categorization of some faces may be easier than others. In particular, categorizing racially ambiguous faces has been shown to be difficult and cognitively taxing. Many theorists have argued that people’s judgments in racially ambiguous categorization are driven by the one-drop rule, a heuristic whereby one drop of “Black blood” identifies a mixed-race individual as Black (Davis, 1991) also known as “hypodescent” (e.g., Ho, Sidanius, Levin, & Banaji, 2011). However, the majority of this research has focused on White and western samples of participants and biracial Black/White faces, meaning we do not know how generalizable these findings may be outside of a U.S. construction of race or whether this same heuristic is applied to Asian/White individuals who reflect one of the fastest growing biracial demographics. To address this issue, the current study tested both Asian American and Taiwanese children to explore the role that racial and cultural group membership may play in the development of these perceptions. Additionally, essentialist beliefs were measured which have been shown in past work in the U.S. to be predictive of hypodescent (e.g., Chen & Hamilton, 2012; Gaither et al., 2014).

Method: Taiwanese children (N = 74, 40 female; ages 3-6 years, Mage = 5.08) and Asian American children (N = 65, 32 female; ages 3-7 years, Mage = 5.27), were recruited. All participants were asked to categorize 12 racially ambiguous biracial Black/White faces and 12 biracial Asian/White faces in a dichotomous forced-choice task (i.e., category choices of Black or White or Asian or White respectively). Children also completed a short three-item essentialism task that examined their beliefs about the immutability of racial group membership (Gaither et al., 2014; Hirschfeld, 1995; Ruble et al., 2007).

Results & Discussion: Regarding biracial Black/White faces, Taiwanese and Asian American children both showed similar tendencies—they categorized the ambiguous faces as White significantly more often compared to chance levels, regardless of having essentialist thinking or not (all ps < .048). Regarding biracial Asian/White faces, Taiwanese children with essentialist beliefs (n = 22) categorized the faces significantly more often as White compared to chance levels (p = .045). Taiwanese children without essentialist beliefs (n = 54) categorized the faces significantly more often as Asian (p = .049) or as their ingroup. However, Asian American children categorized these faces equally as either White or Asian and essentialist beliefs did not influence categorization outcomes.

Our data suggest hyperdescent over hypodescent for more commonly studied biracial Black/White faces—a finding that seems to generalize in both cultural contexts. However, biracial Asian/White stimuli may be perceived in more fixed-like patterns in predominately Asian contexts, since only Taiwanese children showed increased outgroup categorizations once essentialist beliefs were endorsed. To our knowledge, this is the first cross-cultural exploration of ambiguous face categorization in children. Additionally, these data highlight the need for future work to explicitly test how universal ambiguous face processes are.

Authors

• Sarah E. Gaither, Duke University
  Presenting Author

• Chun-Man Chen, Graduate Institute of Biomedical Sciences, China Medical University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Sarina Hui-Lin Chien, China Medical University
  Non-Presenting Author